Monday, April 22, 2013

A Spring Kit: Part 2

The Main Components: Flowers and Florals

Well, if there's two clip art & graphics categories for which we are best known, they would have to be Floral and Flowers. You might argue that Art Nouveau was perhaps our strongest suit, but Art Nouveau is so floral that it's tempting to call it a subset of Floral & Flowers. There are so many collections to cover that I'll probably extend A Spring Kit to 3 or more blog posts.

Generally, they way we parse the difference between Flowers and Floral at DoverPictura is realism vs. stylization, respectively. Our Flower collections usually represent the subject matter in a natural, illustrative manner, with varying degrees of shading and sculpting.

Typical "Flower" image

Floral collections typically depict flowers as decorative motifs with which the designer or artist has taken certain artistic liberties to enhance the graphic qualities of the subject matter.

Typical "Floral" image

Two of my favorite Flower collections are:

Redouté Flowers and Fruits (0486996069),which is a superb collection of flower and fruit illustrations by Marie Antoinette's official court artist, the Belgian painter and botanist, Pierre-Joseph Redouté; noteworthy within this collection are the roses. These images are particularly adaptable for collage work and card-making.

Flowers Vector Designs (0486991245), is another favorite (and not because I am the author..) because of the combination of the beauty of the line art drawings, and the usefulness of the vector file format images. In assembling this collection we drew upon some of Dover's best black & white clip art, which we then vectorized. Vector images give the artist and crafter the ability to create large-scale illustrations in programs like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape, and are great for creating special effects. When you purchase the whole collection you get a pdf document of the entire publication that includes tutorials for creating some of the effects shown in the included gallery of sample images.